Friday, June 7, 2013

"A Continuing Conundrum"

You know what’s interesting?

(Whoa, there I go again.Assuming what’s interesting to me will be interesting to anybody
else.Though, in truth, that is the premise
of every blog post I ever wrote.Which
does not make it correct.It’s just… There
it is.)

I shall keep this short, on the off-chance that you couldn’t
care less.(A lot of people say, “I could care less” in these situations,
but they’re wrong.What they really mean is they couldn’t care less, the implication being there is nothing they could imaginably care less
about than the subject at hand.In the
final analysis, however, people can do what they want to.I couldn’t care less.)

A week ago Friday, I wrote a post about…what was it again?... Sometimes,
I have trouble remembering what I just wrote… Oh, yeah.It was a question about why people bother
being funny.But what the post was about
is not the issue.The issue is the perplexing
process of preparing that post.

I have mentioned this before, even once demonstrating – with
examples – my procedure for rewriting a post until it felt “right.”I showed how, after the first pass, I make
changes, and then continue revising subsequent drafts – though the number of
changes progressively diminishes – until I am satisfied with the results, and I
publish the post.

The thing is, although the number of revisions continues to decrease
the more drafts I produce, not once in the, now, thirteen hundred-and-eighty
posts, have I ever been confronted by a draft that required no revisions whatsoever.

Not once!

Even in my final pass, I find missed typos.I adjust punctuation for greater
clarity.I upgrade my descriptives.I revert back to passages I attempted to
improve but, instead, I made worse.I
revisit the dreaded italics, thinking
and re-thinking the “when’s” and “where’s.”

Inevitably, I discover things I still want to improve.In last Friday’s post, I made twenty changes
in my final pass.

The question then is,

If on my final pass before publishing, I find twenty things in there to change, why don’t I continue rewriting until there aren’t any?

Close to five-and-a-half years of blog writing.And in every draft, I find something to revise.